When the construction blockades at Lincoln Center renovation finally came down down last year, the flowing crowds and fountain crowding returned. The first impression theater-goers get of the Diller Scofido + Renfro renovation are the flashing from LED lights embedded into the steps facing Columbus Avenue. The lights function as an underfoot marquee with titles of various productions flashing and scrolling across the steps, announcing venues and lighting the path. But last Tuesday night the lights seemed to be on the fritz. Elsewhere, the Hugh Hardy 130 seat theater addition atop the Vivian Beaumont Theater is nearing completion…

The 30th Street Passage will move through Hudson Yards Tower C and lead visitors toward the offshoot section of the High Line called the Tenth Avenue Spur.

Tonight, the design team from the High Line will present plans for Section 3 to the community. Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe will introduce James Corner from the project’s lead team, James Corner Field Operations, and Ricardo Scofidio from Diller Scofidio + Renfro. High Line co-founder Robert Hammond will moderate a post presentation discussion.

Unlike the last two sections of the High Line, Section 3 will be intimately integrated with one major developer, as opposed to a variety of property owners and stakeholders. From 30th to 34th Street, the High Line wraps around Hudson Yards, the 12 million square foot office and residential district being developed by Related Companies. Much of the new section will be built cheek by jowl with Related’s construction. At the westernmost section overlooking the Hudson River, an interim walkway will span the existing self-seeded landscape, so as coordinated design efforts alongside Related’s development and give Friends of the High Line time to raise more funds.

The estimated total cost of capital construction on the High Line at the rail yards is $90 million. Construction is expected to be complete by the end of 2013 with a full public opening in spring 2014.

DS+R Takes it Higher.DS+R was selected to design a new residential tower at Hudson Yards, adjacent to the third section of the High Line.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro is climbing ever higher near the High Line with their first ever skyscraper. The Wall Street Journal reports that the firm was selected by Related Development to work with the Rockwell Group on an 800 foot tall, 700 unit residential building that will play well with its architectural cousin next door. Elizabeth Diller tells the paper the architects are “very conscious of the adjacency to the High Line.” Indeed. DS+R, along with Field Operations, will be unveiling plans for the third and final section of the High Line at a community meeting tonight.
Public School 11 Auditorium 320 West 21st, RSVP to railyards@thehighline.org.

Cornell Chooses Six Finalists for Tech Campus.The initial SOM proposal for Cornell's tech campus. (Courtesy SOM)
And then there were six. Cornell University announced that six firms were selected from a field of 43 contenders to design their new tech campus on Roosevelt Island. SOM, the firm that pushed Cornell over the top in the national competition to build on Roosevelt is still in the running, alongside OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) , Diller Scofidio + Renfro , MorphosisArchitects , Steven Holl Architects , and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. SOM will remain on the job to define an overall campus plan. The university is still running with its net-zero plan for the first core building. Residences and other multi-use buildings will follow. A contract with the winning firm is set to be signed in April.

Rather than add a few hundred more words to the tens of thousands already devoted to praise the Diller Scofidio + Renfro / FXFOWLE renovation of the Julliard School and Alice Tully Hall, I think today that I will remember the original architect, Pietro Belluschi (1899-1994). As a young faculty member at the University of Virginia, I got to know his work a bit. He designed the UVA School of Architecture. The building was muscular, had clear structure, and well expressed the late 1960s/early ‘70s last gasps of Brutalism.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Broad center for contemporary art features a distinctive structural honeycomb facade. It may be getting a neighbor with another notable facade, a new 19 story apartment building with staggered windows in a variety of sizes designed by Miami-based Arquitectonica. According to blogdowntown, the building would include 258 units with 52 set aside for affordable housing and 308 parking spaces in a three level below-grade garage. Developed by Related Companies, the tower would share the plaza with DS+R’s museum and back up to the planned Regional Connector light rail station.

With the High Line getting the lion’s share of attention lately, Hudson River Park feels more neighborhoody then ever. Last night’s opening of public art installation by artist/performer Jon Morris of Windmill Factory felt pretty down home with everyone sprawling out on the grass around Morris, who explained the inspiration for his light show which sits out in the water.

Growing up in Beria, Kentucky, Morris could see the stars, but in New York light pollution made the experience impossible. His idea was to sprinkle a little stardust onto the Hudson in the form of solar powered LEDs attached to the tops of pilings from a long departed pier.

60 Seconds Helicopter. The Sikorsky Prize is legendary, for it has not yet been awarded–it’s still awaiting its first winner, whose human-powered helicopter will reach an altitude of 3 meters (10 feet) during a flight lasting at least 60 seconds, while remaining in a 10 meter square (32.8 foot square). But Inhabitat reports that if things go as planned, a team of students from the University of Maryland may be taking home the prize with their human-powered flying machine, the Gamera.

BIG’s beautified universe. Metropolis deconstructs the renderings of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)’s latest project: a mosque complex in Tirana, Albania. While the thoughtful octagonal design (an overlap of the Mecca orientation and Tirana’s urban grid) may have put BIG in front of the competition, one can’t help wonder if the seductive juxtaposition of photo-realism and and benign atmospheric glow in BIG’s renderings may be the secret to the firm’s running marathon of competition wins.

More Getty Trust. Christopher Knight at The Los Angeles Times raises a good point regarding the J. Paul Getty Trust’s appointment of James Cuno, currently director of the Art Institute of Chicago, as Trust president and chief executive: It might be a brilliant idea to appoint him to the directorship for the Getty Museum, finally merging the two positions.

Suburbia Objectified? Allison Arieff of The New York Timescomments on the recently launched Open House, a collaborative project in which the Dutch design collective Droog and Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects imagined “future suburbia.” She laments that the project missed the point– by treating a real place (Levittown) as a “perfect blank canvas” and dodging “the real issues.”

Freecell's Bright Dawn Farm will transform a backyard into a greenhouse as part of Droog and DS+R's Open House project.

On Saturday, April 23 the conceptual Dutch design company Droog and Diller Scofidio + Renfro presented “Open House,” a project that offered dialogue for possible new social and economic models to revitalize pre-existing suburban neighborhoods. The one-day event began with a symposium at Columbia’s off-site Studio-X in Downtown Manhattan, followed by a field trip to Levittown, Long Island, where nine homes from the fabled, archetypal post-war American suburb were transformed into residential marketplaces with experimental installations by designers, architects, and homeowners.

Ok, get ready for the strangest, most audacious project you’ve seen in a long time. Our friends at Architizer just tipped us off to BOOM, a $250 million community being developed in Rancho Mirage, outside of Palm Springs, that includes some pretty inventive, or (maybe more like it) wacky designs by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, LOT-EK, J.Mayer H., and seven more firms. The ultra-expressive project, set to begin construction next year, will include 300 residences built in eight neighborhoods, each designed by a different firm (important note: the developer, Matthias Hollwich, is a co-founder of Architizer). Read More

The recent unveiling of Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Broad Art Foundation has been generating a lot of buzz in the past couple weeks. The defining architectural element of the museum is its porous structural concrete veil which the architects hope will create an interplay between interior and exterior spaces. The Broad’s concrete skin won’t be Los Angeles’ first, however. Sitting just two miles away on Wilshire Boulevard, the American Cement Building features a mid-century veil of its own.